A Female Dragon? Examining the Evidence

[swollymammoth]

5 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

At least, it should not be.

This is an extremely well articulated opinion, and I thank you for it. 

[Siberian Rat]

1 hour ago, Elder_Haman said:

But what does that look like? 

A whole lot less spanking, is my guess.

[king of nowhere]

13 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

A /lot/ of the stuff that actually happens and needs to be updated is, literally, spankings and gratuitous nudity.   And I think that everyone is pretty willing to trim that out.

i don't see anything wrong with some ceremonies being held nude. it's not like real world lacks other strange customs. it's ok if it's done tactfully.

 

I was thinking of the raising of egwene to amyrlin, and how it could be depicted

we see the scene of the ceremony, narrated by the voice of siuan sanche. at some point, a sitter declares she's a woman and strips down

scene cuts away to siuan and egwene in their chamber. a befuddled egwene lets out a befuddled "and then what?"

siuan answers "yes, it once happened that a man tried to infiltrate into such a ceremony, and since them it was required to prove your gender. Just be glad you'll be allowed to dress again afterwards; until three centuries ago, you'd have been fully naked throught the whole ceremony"

scene cuts back to the various aes sedai readjusting their clothing.

[swollymammoth]

7 minutes ago, Tim said:

The difference between us is that you attribute more extreme intentions to him because you don’t trust him for some reason.

 

I don't haha and It's totally irrational. Nothing you said in this reply is wrong or irrational, and I concede that. I am definitely allowing my fears of a worst case scenario to run rampant a little. 

 

This show could be awesome, and I surely hope it is. 

 

At the same time, I do worry that there's a bit of "just happy it's real" energy in this forum rn. It's cool to be excited, but let's keep in mind that we don't owe this show anything. Amazon literally sees us as dollar signs. That's all we are to them, potential profit, and it's our job as fans to keep them honest. I can't help but be skeptical until I actually see that the show doesn't suck haha 

[Siberian Rat]

There needs to be more nudity in the TV show, and going by the age rating I’m guessing there is.

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Tim said:

The only thing we know Rafe has concretely suggested he will change is polygamy to polyamory.

and i keep arguing that there's nothing to change there, because the books never used the word polygamy once, and from the way those relationships were framed - always with full consensus of everyone involved - makes it clear it fits the modern concept of polyamory.

It's just that in 1991 the word "polyamory" still didn't exhist. or, if it exhisted, it wasn't known to the general public. I remember in the early 2000 seeing a short documentary featuring a couple of poliamorous trios, one made by a man and two women, the other by two men and one woman. And that documentary never used the word polyamory. it's really a recent word.

 

and we see few instances of it. first is rand. and it's ok, it's quite an individual case. and rand's romantical scenes are not particularly well written, and there's a lot left unexplored in that relationship, but i don't see a general problem with it.

then there's some greens with their warders. Some people are complaining about that, seeing it as an abuse of power from the dominant aes sedai. I don't think so. I think when you have a close bond with another person, and you can feel each other's emotion, and you spend a lot of time together and share adventures and risks, and you have to present a stern face to the outside world and can only lower the mask with each other... well, i'm only surprised there aren't more aes sedai-warder romances. it's not the only possible outcome - a platonic relationship like lan and moiraine is perfectly fine - but for many people it's going to end up romantic.

you don't even have to figure out how to declare yourself to the other one, or if you should try to hide it; they will know through the bond.

and finally there are the aiels, and i see nothing wrong there. the women ask for marriage. a woman may take a sister wife, and the husband can either accept the sister wife, or divorce from his first wife too (hopefully they speak among each other before arriving to that point!). there may be some backlash for the fact that there's only 2 women - 1 men, and no 2 men - 1 woman. But i expect the constant warfare to kill a lot of aiel men (women too, but there are much more fighting men than women; there are 12 men fighting societies, maidens of the spears are the only female one), so they'd have a surplus of women.

if they wanted to make things equal, they may just mention that 2 men - 1 woman trio exhist among aiel, but are more rare. it's a change to the worldbuilding, but i'd be ok with it if it's the only concession we must make to woke.

[Tim]

19 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

At the same time, I do worry that there's a bit of "just happy it's real" energy in this forum rn. It's cool to be excited, but let's keep in mind that we don't owe this show anything. Amazon literally sees us as dollar signs. That's all we are to them, potential profit, and it's our job as fans to keep them honest. I can't help but be skeptical until I actually see that the show doesn't suck haha

That’s fair. I’m much more worried about clunky dialogue, characters that seem shallow or poorly motivated, plot developments that seem forced or nonsensical unless you have read the books, and a lot of awkward exposition holding everything together - i.e. the risks that run with a broadly “faithful” but hamfisted TV or film adaptation of a long fantasy series.

[Tim]

24 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

if they wanted to make things equal, they may just mention that 2 men - 1 woman trio exhist among aiel, but are more rare. it's a change to the worldbuilding, but i'd be ok with it if it's the only concession we must make to woke.

yeah I think all it needs is to remove the suggestion that it’s exclusively one way. Which is a change so minor that it would barely be noticed. 

[Deadsy]

I've yet to see a reason why it matters that they float the possibility that Egwene or Nynaeve could be the Dragon Reborn. Most of the audience for this show will be non readers. They don't need to know in season 1 how much this would have changed the story.

[WhiteVeils]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

i don't see anything wrong with some ceremonies being held nude. it's not like real world lacks other strange customs. it's ok if it's done tactfully.

 

I was thinking of the raising of egwene to amyrlin, and how it could be depicted...

 

And I'm thinking of armies of naked gaishin sitting in the sun, and Rosamund Pike running nekkid into Ruiden.  If it contributes, it's OK. If it detracts...it's not.  On a page, it neither contributes nor detracts, but actually depicting it in TV is a completely different medium.

[king of nowhere]

19 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

 

And I'm thinking of armies of naked gaishin sitting in the sun, and Rosamund Pike running nekkid into Ruiden.  If it contributes, it's OK. If it detracts...it's not.  On a page, it neither contributes nor detracts, but actually depicting it in TV is a completely different medium.

you know what, you're right. on the books, it's a small piece of worldbuilding. on tv, it would be taken as shameless fanservice, and explaining it would not work very well.

Pity, though

Edited November 1, 2021 by king of nowhere

[SinisterDeath]

2 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

The WoT world is what it is, and the books should be treated like the bible when referencing how the world/society/characters should be represented.

Treated like it was passed down orally for centuries, written in both Hebrew and Greek, translated badly into Latin, and ultimately from Greek/Latin into English, all while holding various councils that determined which books & translations were the correct one?

 

 

3 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

The idea that it was supposed to be "modern" for its time and so should always reflect modern sensibilities is not insane. It's a nuanced take, but I just don't agree with it.

It's fine if you don't agree with it. ?

 

3 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

It's a nuanced take, but I just don't agree with it. I'm alright with works being time capsules of their eras, and I also think it's pretty presumptuous to claim that an updated adaptation is what a writer would have done had they been alive in modern times. (You did not say that, but I've noticed that it's something of a common sentiment, so I mentioned it here). 

Yet, it's ultimately intended to be a product that is sold in our time. 
Someone mentioned a what if they remade this classic movie that had racist portrayals of black women? 
Why is the idea of making characters more human and less a caricature of their time (a trope), need to be viewed as this unholy disrespect for the authors story?

Another side of this is RJ approved a LOT of stuff that wasn't...congruent with his work.
That video game? Seal of approval.
The TTRPG? Seal of approval.
Book Covers/Artwork in the BWB? Seal of approval.

Most fans don't most of those to be cannon. (We generally accept the text in BWB as cannon, but the artwork... sucks)

So would RJ have written it differently if he were a live today? 100%.
If he started Eye of the World in 2020, it would have been a very different book.
If he continued writing, and had we gotten Infinity of Heaven? His writing would have evolved over time. Every author develops their voice over time.

Is Micheal Jordan better than LeBron James? Would MJ be the Goat and show LJ who's boss if he started basketball at the same time, with all the scientific advances in sport sciences in the last 30 years? Who knows? 

 

 

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

You can keep a matriarcal society and a world shaped by that, without making everyone look like a moron.

100% agree.
Someone once said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I can't understand why people in WoT didn't work together. That it took so long for Rand to get these nations to begrudgingly stop fighting each other and work together to fight a common enemy, when it already appeared all was lost.. Then COVID happened, and I realized Jordan was optimistic that Rand could even get the help he did".
 

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Why not?

Spanking and other similar physical punishment have been used routinely for millennia. the white tower spanks novices that misbehave? perfectly reasonable; 50 years ago, teachers could spank their kids too.

Spanking in WoT was more fetish than punishment?

 

3 hours ago, Tim said:

Currently, though, what evidence there is suggests that he is choosing to emphasise, rather than minimise, the existing differences between men and women in the WOT universe.

I'd actually be interested in reading this evidence you're talking about here?
 
From what I've seen, I'd say he's emphasizing right out of the gate, that Women are very much in power,  in Randland, and that Male Lead nations are very much the minority, whether that's in the home, or in politics. This world is, very different from our own.

Hell, in the books it's implied that the women's circle in the Two Rivers are the ones "really" in charge, and that the Village Council is just there so the men feel important. ? 

[Tim]

2 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

Someone once said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I can't understand why people in WoT didn't work together. That it took so long for Rand to get these nations to begrudgingly stop fighting each other and work together to fight a common enemy, when it already appeared all was lost.. Then COVID happened, and I realized Jordan was optimistic that Rand could even get the help he did".

yeah I think this aspect of WOT - the difficulty of uniting nations and interest groups even in the face of clear cataclysmic danger - was very realistic.
 

What seemed unrealistic for several books in the middle - reaching a nadir with Crossroads of Twilight - was the failure of the key characters to communicate regularly with one another and keep eachother in the loop, even when travelling and the world of dreams had solved the tyranny of distance. 

Rand could have saved himself a lot of difficulty by setting up some sort of information relay arrangement via the wise ones. 

[Tim]

2 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

I'd actually be interested in reading this evidence you're talking about here?
 
From what I've seen, I'd say he's emphasizing right out of the gate, that Women are very much in power,  in Randland, and that Male Lead nations are very much the minority, whether that's in the home, or in politics. This world is, very different from our own.

Yeah, this is basically what I mean - though there’s just not that much evidence either way yet.
 

The matriarchal aspects of the society aren’t strongly emphasised in the first book, even though they are there. We don’t see aes sedai other than Moiraine and (briefly) Elaida, Andor’s monarchy is matrilineal but Shienar has a king (and we don’t learn about female power in Shienar until the next book), and the power of the EF women’s circle is largely presented as “soft”, played out through women applying pressure to their own individual husbands. 
 

The idea that women organising separately is a pattern that reproduces itself in different ways in different social groups throughout the WOT world is not something you’d pick up clearly from TEOTW, and perhaps not properly until The Shadow Rising. But what we’ve seen so far - particular the teaser - really leans into that. 
 

see also Rafe’s discussion of the unique nature of the bond relationship between a female AS and a male warder. The fact that this is filtered through gender - albeit in a manner not referable to our world - seems to be considered an important feature, for him at least. 

[DaddyFinn]

30 minutes ago, Tim said:

see also Rafe’s discussion of the unique nature of the bond relationship between a female AS and a male warder. The fact that this is filtered through gender

Why wouldn't it be? Male AS are extinct and there's no female warders. Of course we all know this changes later on.

 

Edit. I may have misinterpreted(is that correct lol) your meaning and you didn't criticise anything. I'm still waking up don't kill me. ?

Edited November 2, 2021 by DaddyFinn

[Tim]

It's difficult to follow the thread of these conversations as they evolve through various side-points and arcana, but earlier there was the suggestion that Rafe plans to remove those aspects of the books that emphasise the differences between men and women - such as by making soul-migration gender fluid, leaving open the prospect that the dragon is female, toning down on the constant misunderstandings between men and women - in favour of a more gender-blind approach.

My point is that things like Rafe (correctly in my view) emphasising the unique, gendered nature of the Aes Sedai / Warder relationship (which holds true in the books up until the point Elayne bonds Birgitte) seems to be inconsistent with that assumption, as does making female-only organising a more prominent aspect of the story from the outset (from Tar Valon generally to showing us Egwene's women's circle initiation). The fact that women have power in WOT seems rooted in the emphasis of difference between the genders, rather than in the abolition of difference. 

As far as I can tell from what he has said, Rafe sees this as an opportunity to explore feminist themes while doing so in a manner that does not resemble our modern world, where female social power is largely a function of the extent to which a given society is gender-blind in its understanding of how social power is to be wielded and by whom - even measures that appear not to be gender-blind, like mandatory quotas for female political representation, are typically grounded in the assumption that men and women are effectively equivalent in their capacity to hold political power, and hence political representation should broadly reflect population share. In WOT, we see social formations that appear as, variously, patriarchal, matriarchal, or equal-but-different, but in all cases men and women are not considered to be equivalent and interchangeable in terms of the exercise of social power.

In other words, WOT is a "what if" scenario in the vein of a lot of sci-fi or alternate history, but rather than the scenario being one where gender is more fluid than in the real world (like, say, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness), the scenario is one where a character's gender is more determinative of the social role they will play (like, say, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale); it just happens that in WOT this does not produce consistently patriarchal social outcomes, and in many instances produces matriarchal outcomes.

Edited November 2, 2021 by Tim

[Morani]

One thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that updating something to modern sensibilities does not have to actually change any of the content. 

 

I think that for example Downton Abbey did this well with the Thomas character, who is gay. More or less everyone else in the show thinks that somehow makes him less, or at least that is is distasteful, cause sadly that is how gay people were seen back then. There is more or less no dialogue connected to his sexuality that is positive, and he is initially only shown as mean, untrustworthy and  shrewd. No actions or lines comes off as being straight from the 21st century.  But, by showing Thomas internal struggle and pain, we also realize how extremely hard this must be for him. And we also come to sympathize with him after realizing that he is the way he is because how hard life has been on him. 

 

If this was NOT updated for modern sensibilities, we would have made due with all of the main characters being mean to Thomas, and that would have been it. By letting Thomas reactions show the negative effect of discrimination and hate, we get a more full picture, without turning it into a sermon of gay rights. 

[king of nowhere]

13 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

Spanking in WoT was more fetish than punishment?

yes, ok, and i said times and again that it can be toned down, and we don't need to have whole episodes devoted to it.

 

but if they remove entirely the notion of corporal punishment in a society where corporal punishment should be the norm, it would tickle a bit my suspension of disbelief.

 

and if egwene didn't resist physical punishment by embracing pain, her arc in the white tower would be diminished.

 

Just because something is exaggerated, it does not mean that it's bad or that it should be removed entirely.

[DaddyFinn]

10 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

and if egwene didn't resist physical punishment by embracing pain, her arc in the white tower would be diminished.

Change butt slapping to back whipping. More painful and leaves possibly permanent marks depending what is used as a tool.

Edited November 2, 2021 by DaddyFinn

[Morani]

5 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Change butt slapping to back whipping. More painful and leaves possibly permanent marks depending what is used as a tool.

Up until Egwene is tortured in the later books, more or less all corporal punishment can be exchanged for hard and demeaning work, with no changes to the feel of the story. Both for the Aiel and the White Tower. In the WT, it can be to scrub toilets, to carry water or other very physical work. That way, being sent to Sheriam would still feel like a punishment to fear. For the Aiel, we already have the really creative meaningless punishments, like digging a hole and filling it in again, over and over. Imo that would do for much better TV than spanking. If you really want corporal punishment in the White Tower, slapping someone's fingers with a ruler would work too. 

 

When it comes to Egwene in the later books, I think whipping could be fitting. It is supposed to be over the top and something that appalls a lot of the other Aes Sedai. 

[king of nowhere]

16 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Change butt slapping to back whipping. More painful and leaves possibly permanent marks depending what is used as a tool.

unfortunately, sadomaso practices that include spanking also include back whipping, i don't see it as an improvement ??‍♂️

slapping fingers with a ruler... now, i've seen a lot of kinky videos, but that one's new.

 

Still, I'm not comfortable with banning something from tv just because it's a sadomaso practice. practically everything could be a sadomaso practice.

[SinisterDeath]

5 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

Still, I'm not comfortable with banning something from tv just because it's a sadomaso practice. practically everything could be a sadomaso practice.

Well, yea.

The point being made is that the spankings in the novels largely have more to do with fetish than it does with advancing the narrative. (Thankfully WoT isn't like Sword of Truth which = torture porn)

If spanking is meant to drive home to Egwene that she's a child (After just being recognized as a Woman), then there are ways of doing these spankings to drive that home message, without turning it into an obvious sexual fetish/fanservice.

I mean, if you really just want to see Zoë Robins, Madeleine Madden, and Ceara Coveney's bare bottom being smacked on TV, you can just say that you want to see their bare bottoms. ? 

[king of nowhere]

8 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

I mean, if you really just want to see Zoë Robins, Madeleine Madden, and Ceara Coveney's bare bottom being smacked on TV, you can just say that you want to see their bare bottoms. ? 

in the internt age, i don't have any shortage of bare bottoms to see. ?

that's why i suggested a scream and fade to black approach.

 

I do believe the spanking can be done tastefully and used for its story purpose without becoming fetish fuel. i sumbit to the director's experience in how it can be done

[DaddyFinn]

27 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

unfortunately, sadomaso practices that include spanking also include back whipping, i don't see it as an improvement ??‍♂️

For sure. There's all sorts of people that enjoy doing stuff that most of us find horrifying. I doubt blood-spilling whipping would be considered the same as bare-butt-slapping which leaves bruises at most but I'm sure they'll figure out suitable punishments.

 

Maybe put her to a corner with a cone-shaped hat that has something very insulting written on it. ?

[themann1086]

16 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Maybe put her to a corner with a cone-shaped hat that has something very insulting written on it. ?

I must regretfully inform you that this is also a kink